A Little OldFashioned Ingenuity
by Phoenicia
Summary: First Christmas on Earth, Athrun finds it's not quite so different from PLANT, and that the best gifts are handmade. Takes places post-SEED and pre-GSD  roughly three months after the end of SEED . AsuCag. Originally written 01/06.


_CE 71 12.14_

For at least two weeks, festive music and decorations had begun to appear whenever one turned a corner in ORB. Merchants hung out brightly colored banners, swags of garland draped from every lightpole, and songs with familiar tunes and unfamiliar singers echoed everywhere.

Christmas, such as it was, appeared to be the same here as in PLANT, Athrun Zala thought as he walked, hands deep in his pockets, down the main hallway of the assembly building. The same anticipation, the same joy, the same fellowship. He passed a group of men carrying a large tree in towards the atrium, several women following along with boxes of what looked to be ornaments and lights. _ORB, and the rest of Earth...are not quite so different from us as Father insisted. Both are full of people who want to live their lives in security and peace._ He smiled and turned the corner into the assembly meeting hall, narrowly missing a collision with a large, flouncing blob of lilacs.

"Oh?" the blob said. "So sorry, Alex-kun." Not lilacs, but one Jona Roma Seiran. The two smelled much the same to him: an almost false sweetness over something unidentifiable and slightly pungent. In case it rubbed off, Athrun was glad they hadn't actually touched. "Good bye, my honey~!" Jona called over his shoulder, flicking an airy wave to the room's other occupant. "Be sure to wear the red dress for my party~~~."

Stepping into the room, Athrun blinked. Cagalli had the inkwell in her hand, ready to pitch it at the wall, but she sucked in a deep, composing breath between clenched teeth and firmly put it down. Few could set her temper off quite like her (sadly not late and unlamented) fiance, but as with politics she was, by necessity, learning to rein in her emotions. "Are you going to tell me to wear a certain dress, too?" she asked, a bit sharply, eyes still on the desk in front of her.

"Not until I'm out of range."

That quip snapped her head up, lion's eyes flashing with fire, but all that came out was a soft laugh. "Good one, Zala." Cagalli sighed, a deep and almost weary sound, then began gathering her notes from the meeting. "Where have you been while my jailers have kept me here?"

"Around." Athrun made a vague wave of his hand towards town. "I ordered some parts for the car I'm building, and I took in some of the sights. ORB really goes all out in decorating for Christmas."

"Damn." Hands flat and fingers spread on the desk, Cagalli's shoulders slumped. "I'd almost forgotten about Christmas. It'll be the first one without...yeah." She didn't automatically tear up just from talking about her father's death now, but thinking about it was no easier, even six months later.

"I know." The loss of Athrun's own father, while under different circumstances, felt no less sharp. "But it will be our first together...and your first with Kira."

Cagalli gave him a watery smile, sniffing against emotion. "No offense, to you or Kira, but today's one of those days I don't feel like I'm grown up enough to appreciate having you both and not having my father."

"Come here." Instinct guided Athrun across the desk, sliding over its surface to sit on its edge and hold her in his arms. "No one says you have to be grown up all the time, Cagalli."

They both were quiet for a long moment, not needing words to communicate the things between them. Athrun's hand made small circles on Cagalli's back and she played with the fastenings of his jacket. As he breathed in the scent of her hair, the green trees drew Athrun's eyes out the window to the sunny December day. "The forecast doesn't give much hope of snow for Christmas."

Against his shoulder, Cagalli snorted, laughing with her entire body. "Athrun..." she said, pulling back enough where she could look at him and pluck off his sunglasses (she really didn't like them but recognized them as somewhat necessary towards keeping his identity under wraps). "ORB is practically at the equator. That means it never snows here, nor do we have winter." Lightly patting his cheeks with her hands, she wiggled free of his embrace. "Now, are you going to feed me? Arguing with know-it-all men three times my age always makes me hungry."

"Ah...mmm." The mouse-wheel of Athrun's mind was already turning, running in another direction. Could he? And if so, how? Where? His legs were kind enough to walk for themselves, following in Cagalli's wake, while the rest of him planned...

_CE 71 12.24_

The first day Cagalli hadn't even noticed his absence. Meetings and minor crises kept her busy the second through the fourth days, the fifth she meant to find him but Jona found her first. The sixth she went to see Kira, and the seventh and eighth she wished she hadn't-Lacus assured her that he _would _be all right but this was still Kira, her little brother; seeing him still so faraway and unresponsive worried Cagalli deeply. The ninth she called him, no less than thirty-seven times, and each one met with his calm "I'm sorry, I can't come to the phone now" message. By the tenth day, she was on the verge of summoning the ORB military to look for him (though Kisaka told her when she first mentioned it that not only was it a Bad Idea, it bordered on abuse of power and would hardly give her any points with the other ruling families) when a call came in from Erica Simmons.

"Merry Christmas, Cagalli-san. I believe something of yours is lost over here in Morgenroete. Would you please come collect him?" Erica smiled in her serene, secretive way and cut off the connection, leaving an open-mouthed Cagalli gaping at the blank screen.

She remained thus for a full thirty seconds before shoving herself back from the desk and storming from her office, with each step cursing Coordinators (except for Kira and Lacus), cursing wool-headed mechanics, cursing blue-black hair and green eyes and the prettiest smile she'd ever seen. Morgenroete. What the _hell_ was he doing in Morgenroete?

Cagalli scowled and stalked out of the building; anyone in her way wisely jumped aside. "He'd better not be building me one of those damned Haros..."

Onogoro Island was a very short boat ride from the main island, but even sea air and miles of ocean did nothing to calm the tempest of Cagalli Yula Athha. The Morgenroete landing was deserted, but the hangar door was open; clearly she was expected. "You are _so_ dead, Zala. What could possibly be so damned important that you could ditch me for ten whole days?" Her boots echoed in hollow metallic sounds as she crossed the hangar. On the far edge, near a corridor, she sighted him, a familiar figure in a trenchcoat and scarf, excitedly pointing out something on a data pad to a systems engineer.

"ATHRUN ZALA! WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?"

"Cagalli?" Athrun dropped the pad, and it bounced off the metal floor. "Ah...you're early...I told Erica-san fifteen hundred hours, not fourteen." He tugged up the sleeve of his coat and his shirt, checking his watch. "No, it's only fourteen-thirty, I don't think it will be ready yet..."

"What?" Cagalli demanded. How dare he look so calm and distracted when she needed answers! "What won't be ready yet? And why have you been MIA for ten days?"

Athrun put an arm around her shoulders and a silencing finger to her lips. Then he smiled, really smiled, and Cagalli remembered just _why_ she had been cursing that smile; it had the power to instantly turn her rage into squishy, gooey, happy feelings. "Come on," he said, and something in his voice and the confident way he took her hand in his made her cheeks feel very hot. "I'll show you."

He led her down the corridor, and with each step Cagalli was sure she felt the temperature dropping. They reached a door at its end; she had a vague recollection of it once being used for MS storage, but with the advent of the M1 Astray project everything had been relocated to the training facility at the other end of Morgenroete. Athrun keyed in the sequence to open the door and turned to her, his eyes looking almost silvered in the dim light. "Welcome to my winter wonderland."

With a hydraulic hiss, the doors opened, and a rush of blowing wind littered with white swept out to greet them. Cagalli's eyes got wide, and she sucked in a sharp breath, coughing because the air was so cold. "Athrun...you did all this?" Her voice was soft with amazement, stunned that he could even _think_ of how to create something like this, and then _do _it.

"Mmm. Well, not all by myself," Athrun amended, leading her onto the path he had earlier cleared for them to walk. "I had to get permission to use the facility, and while refrigeration is hardly a new technology, using it on this scale to this purpose is a little unique. Manufactured snow is the only way it exists in PLANT, with the climatological grid controlling the weather, but I'd heard that ski resorts on Earth use it to supplement their powder base...although there aren't a lot of ski resorts active with the energy crisis on the planet, so much of the information was historical and it had to be adapted and...and I'd be totally taking the magic out of this if I kept talking about it." Later, he could tell her about how wonderful it felt to be in coveralls and grease again, making adjustments and modifying designs and translating the ideas in his head into reality. How wonderful it felt to be _useful,_ for at least a set of days having a purpose he knew without a doubt he could fulfill. "So let's just enjoy it."

The design was actually that of a small village; to Cagalli's eyes it seemed something straight out of a quaint picturebook as they walked along, with a wide street and decorated shops and a giant artificial tree in what would be the town square. And the snow! It continued to fall all around them, blanketing the world in white. It looked stark and very clean where it stuck to Athrun's dark hair, and Cagalli could feel it clinging to her eyelashes. She felt like she had never seen anything quite so wonderful in her entire life. There was no one else around but them, everything in here had been created specifically for her. _Was this how Kira and Lacus felt when you created things for them?_ she thought to herself, glancing up at Athrun.

He caught her eyes on him and he smiled, softer this time, a bit hesitant around the edges. "Do you like it?" he asked, tilting his head to look down at her.

"More than I can say. I've never had anyone do anything so special for me. Thank you, Athrun." Cagalli abruptly shivered, her body reminding her that it was dressed for ORB weather. "...I'm just cold."

Laughing, Athrun took the scarf off his neck and tossed it around hers, using the ends to tug her closer. "That's all right," Athrun said, pulling her to him and surrounding her with arms and trenchcoat. "I'll keep you warm."

"Merry first Christmas together, Cagalli..."


End file.
